I Felt a Funeral in My Brian
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Daniel Harouni
July 13, 2005
Revised-Essay
I Felt a Funeral in My Brian
“I felt a funeral in my brain” by Emily Dickinson traces the speakers descent into madness. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the speakers descending madness and the horror most of us feel about going crazy.
Dickinson uses the metaphor of a funeral to represent the speakers sense that a part of her is dying. This is reason for her, being overwhelmed by the irrationality of the unconscious. A funeral is an appropriate image for this ordeal. The most obvious connotation with a funeral is death. Also a funeral is a formal event, whose rules and procedures suggest control and order. The control and order implicit in a funeral contrast ironically with the lack of control and loss of rationality that threaten the speaker. In addition, a funeral marks the passage from one state to another, life to death, sanity to insanity. However, the poet is not observing the funeral but is feeling it. She is both, observer of the funeral and participant, indicating that the self is divided. The end of the poem illustrates that the self will have shattered into pieces or chaos.
The mourners are a metaphor to express her pain. Their “treading” indicates a pressure that is pushing her down. The repetition of the word “treading,” gives emphasis and suggests the action. The speaker has a momentary impression that reason “sense” is escaping or being lost. The pressure of the treading is reasserted with the repetition, “beating, beating.” This time her mind, the source of reasoning, goes “numb,” a further deterioration in her condition.
You can trace the process of the speakers loss of rationality in stanzas three and four. The last two lines of stanza four assess her condition. She sees herself as “wrecked, solitary.” Her descent into irrationality separates her from other human beings, doing her a member of “some strange race.” Her alienation and inability to communicate are indicated by her being enveloped by silence.
In the last stanza, Dickinson uses the metaphor of standing